Facebook Updates News Feed To Show Fewer Hoaxes

Facebook is updating its News Feed to reduce the false/hoax posts without affecting your daily dose of satire.

"Today's update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook. We are not removing stories people report as false and we are not reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy," Facebook said in a blog post.

 Facebook will add an option to report stories in News Feed as false. It added that it won't actually cut the posts but if such stories make its way into your News Feed, it would contain a warning message.

"This works in the same way as reporting a story as spam. When you click to hide a story you also have the option to report the content. Stories that include scams, or deliberately misleading news, are reported two and a half times more often than links to other news stories," Facebook explained.

However, these updates will have no effect on satirical contents.

"We've found from testing that people tend not to report satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire," Facebook said. "This type of content should not be affected by this update."